MING LOYALIST FAMILIES AND THE CHANGING MEANINGS OF CHOJONG’AM IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHOSŎN

Abstract

The descendants of Ming loyalists who had migrated to Chosŏn with Prince Pongnim in 1645 were an integral part of the Ming loyalist ideology advocated by the Chosŏn court during the eighteenth century. The significance of their presence in Chosŏn, however, waned with the weakening of this ideology and the rise of Northern Learning in the nineteenth century. Under these adverse circumstances, the Ming loyalist families in the early nineteenth century employed various strategies to re-emphasize Ming loyalism and consolidate their Ming loyalist identity; an initiative they viewed as critical in justifying their presence in Chosŏn society. This article traces the variety of these identity-reinforcing efforts by the Ming loyalist families, ranging from shrine-building and compilation efforts to intermarriage. It focuses on the ritual structures built in Chojong’am by these descendants and analyzes how the symbols of Ming loyalism embedded in this place by the Chosŏn literati in the seventeenth century were manipulated by Ming descendants in the early nineteenth century. Through these initiatives, the descendants asserted a new version of Ming loyalism that not only potentially undermined the claims of the Chosŏn court/literati to be the inheritors of Ming culture but strengthened the symbolic significance of the Ming loyalist families. This study illuminates this implicit tension and disjuncture between the positions of the two parties, which is significant for understanding developments, rather than seeing the Ming loyalists’ activities as an outcome of ongoing cooperative interactions between the Chosŏn court and the Ming families nourished during the eighteenth century.